JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum question: portable recording devices

I have a friend who wants to record her dad's stories
what's a good portable recording device with mic inputs?
but not too big so she wants to hide 'em
her dad's shy

ande

She might drop by Radio Shack and see if they still have Micro Recorders.

I will ask my friend about his digital dictation device. He uses it to record live performances and it has incredible fidelity for a simple hand-held device. We just did a show last Thursday that he recorded with it and I am still blown away with how good it sounds.

What is the budget? Huge factor.

Zoom H2 - $200
Zoom H4 - $300

These are small. H4 is 3" x 6" x 1". H2 is smaller. They both have internal stereo mics.

I would not recommend anything Radio Shack sells; there are better choices.

and with the Zooms you can spend $20-30 and get a 2GB thumb drive (the kind you plug into your digital camera), and voila - you can record just tons of stuff in either .WAV format or with .mP3 compression to get upwards of 13 hours.

Our local community college just purchased two Zoom H4's. They are nice and can accommodate XLR mic input too. They are four track also and may be a bit much for recording spoken word. I have noticed that the digital dictation recorders are getting pretty cheap to buy almost anywhere.

I had a similiar question in the recording threads and zoom was also mentioned.
Also a Mac laptop.
But Mac's are quite spendy, although they might end up costing less in the long run than the typical Microsoft type laptop.
There is also a wav/mp3 recorder that came out by Roland if you get into dealing with such recorders and software.

I have been using mp3 players to record outside of my PC.
I want to find something good quality to record with that does'nt have the limitations.
And I hav'nt dealt with sound effects yet.
So I have been procrastinating.

A hidden mike from a laptop placed out of site shouldn't be too hard to organise, and will record for at least two hours without hassle or attention, and is dead easy to edit all the unwanted stuff out of saved as a mp3 or wav file. Graham

There are a number of options. Difficult to advise without a budget as it is always a factor to be taken into consideration. Mini disc can record up to 80mins and is almost CD quality. A simple Mp3 recorder is also an option these are very inexpensive and some have a built in mic ok just for speech. They can then be plugged in to usb port and stored/edited on PC then burned onto disc etc.

I will tell you my opinion from the POV of a television engineer. Don't use a micro cassette or even a digital recorded for something like this. Get the best quality microphone and recording device you can afford. My mother-in-law, June Alexander, is an 85 year old Texas with wonderful stories about Texas history and I have been trying to get her recorded on tape and now that we have HD cameras, I want to record her on that format. Once she is gone, so are her stories. I think we owe it to that generation to get as many stories recorded as possible and to do it with the best quality possible.

I would be interested in what jack finds out because I also would like to have a really good quality (but small) device that has a great microphone and can record live events.

thanks to everyone who answered this

ande

I have a BOSS Micro BR and I love it. I travel a lot and it let's me work on ideas on the road. It has mic input (1) but the built in mic is pretty good too. Maybe overkill for the situation cuz it's actually a pretty decent four track recorder. Oveall it's a great tool for a traveling musician. One warning...there seem to be issues with the SD Card funtion on some units...I had to have the unit swapped...but Roland turned it around in two days and I haven't had a problem since.

..ant

I ditto ant's BOSS Micro BR -- the thing is a champ AND you have option to encode directly as mp3 from the get-go. Clean sound (even with built in mic), incredibly compact and portable.